The Kingdom of Light (16 page)

Further on there was a public fountain, he remembered. He was walking in that direction when he saw a man coming out of a side-alley and heading his way. Dante assessed his chances of turning back, but it was too late.

The man had recognised him, and speeded up to block his path. ‘Greetings, Messer Alighieri. It was high time we
met
. I was waiting for a visit, but perhaps your engagements have held you up,’ he said with a hint of irony.

‘I will come to you when the time is right, don’t worry,’ Dante replied with a frown.

‘But the right time is fast approaching, don’t you know that? It’s already the ides of August,’ the man replied coldly. All trace of affability had vanished from his pock-marked face.

‘Domenico, your loan is guaranteed by my brother Francesco, as you know full well, and by my family’s lands,’ said the poet irritably. He wondered why the usurer had become quite so insolent. Had something happened to weaken his own position in the eyes of this villain?

Meanwhile Domenico had caught up with him, and was jabbing at his chest with his index finger. He looked as if he was about to drum on it, but held himself back. ‘It’s one thousand and eighty florins. Gold ones.’

Dante shivered. Had he amassed such huge debts? He knew that figure very well, it had been repeated a thousand times like a shameful proclamation in all the documents he had had to sign. But now the usurer’s wretched voice seemed to embody a sum of gold as massive as a boulder. He felt as if the world were crumbling around him, ready to drag him down with the ruin that threatened the very walls of Florence.

He thought once more of Cecco, his haughty refusal of his invitation. He tried not to listen to this person’s
petulant
voice, still nattering about maturities and risks. He tried to blank his mind, but Cecco’s proposal went on washing around inside his head like filthy water.

In the end, couldn’t he too have joined in with this crusade business? Who would it have harmed, except for a pack of wealthy and wasteful merchants, and a corrupt and simoniac Church? Might that really have been a way to get out of the mess in which he had ended up?

‘Yes,’ he decided. ‘Those damned Florentines can go to hell.’

H
E REACHED
his destination, conquering the fire that burned his guts. The area was occupied with warehouses, but there was no one to load or unload the goods: the bell had just struck nine, and all the porters must have been busy refreshing themselves. So Dante headed towards the wool warehouse. The guard was at the door, sitting on a keg, with an earthenware jar between his feet.

‘I don’t suppose there’s a consignment of felt in the store?’

The man looked him mildly up and down. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘The authority of Florence.’

‘By the Holy Trinity and Saint John!’ the man replied, suppressing a yawn.

The poet came closer. The guard read something in his
expression
and hurried to his feet, moving back a few steps. ‘Only members of the Guild are allowed in the warehouse. And access to the stores is restricted for reasons of commercial security,’ he added immediately, looking round in alarm. But there was no one he could call for help.

The prior came closer.

‘Perhaps … yes, I think so – a few days ago now …’ the guard stammered, confused, taking another step backwards.

‘Show me where it’s kept.’

The other man was giving in. ‘But I’ll have to tell the captain of the Guild,’ he whined, disappearing into a little cupboard just behind the door. He quickly consulted a tattered book, then crossed the courtyard to the other side of the colonnade, followed by Dante.

The warehouse was filled to the rafters with goods. Still following the guard, Dante entered that labyrinth and started to walk past the loads piled up towards the middle of the building. The Minotaur’s labyrinth could not have been very different from that suffocating inferno, he thought at one point, as he wiped away the sweat from his brow. Finally the man pointed to a pile of greyish bales, tightly bound in hempen ropes.

‘Leave me alone,’ the prior commanded. ‘I have to perform an inspection. Apparently fabric has been brought into the city from Cremona, where there has been an outbreak of plague.’

The guard stepped backwards, crossing himself, and
began
to retreat quickly towards the door, vanishing from view without another word.

Having reassured himself that no one could see his movements, Dante began testing the bales, probing the soft mass with his fingers. Reaching the third one, he felt something hard.

With a few quick movements he liberated the bale from its cords. The hidden content was wrapped in soft felt cloths, as Fabio dal Pozzo and Cecco had said it would be. He went on extricating the ‘treasure’ from its hiding place until he found himself looking at a heavy, compact block, at least two feet by five and more than a span thick. It looked as if someone had hidden a stone slab in the wool.

He delicately cut through a corner of the felt covering with his dagger. A sliver of light from the courtyard exploded with a flash of silver where the felt had come away, dazzling the poet.

A mirror. There was a mirror hidden in the load. A giant slab of mirror, larger than any that Dante had ever seen in his life, not even in the houses of the wealthiest merchants in Florence, or in France, when he had travelled to Paris.

Within a few minutes he frantically inspected the whole load. There were seven more slabs identical to the first, each one carefully protected by felt cloths and hidden amongst the coarse wool. Was this the treasure
that
everyone was waiting for? They must certainly have been enormously expensive, but he guessed that their value must be more than purely monetary.

One corner of the slab must have been broken in transit. Dante picked up the fragment and put it in his pocket.

He carefully tied up the bales again, concealing all trace of his search. Then he left, brusquely summoning the guard.

The man had followed his movements and would certainly go and nose around as soon as he had left. He came over rather reluctantly, staring at the mass of bales.

Dante turned to him and spoke with concern. ‘In the top bale,’ he said, pointing at the one in which he had uncovered the first slab, ‘suspect rags are hidden. Plague,’ and added, ‘It must be burned immediately, outside the city walls. I will assign people to carry out the task, as soon as possible. On no account are you to touch it, don’t let anyone in, and don’t tell anyone what you know, so that the city does not fall into a panic. And now leave, for your own safety.’

Without a doubt, the first thing the ass would do would be to go and tell his friends the news. But at least fear of the consequences would keep him from poking around for a few hours. Judging by the pallor of his face, he looked as if he had believed the story. The mirrors would be safe for a while.

The prior turned back towards the store, trying to
imprint
upon his memory the precise point on the shelves where the load was hidden. Then he made for the door, passing once more by the guard, who was anxiously waiting for him. ‘There are sure to be other rags in the load. It’s not absolutely certain that they come from Cremona, but keep away from them, just to be on the safe side. I’ll be back soon, with the chief physician of Santa Maria. And take care that no one gets close: you have to be careful with the plague.’

The man nodded quickly and firmly.

‘And now tell me who it was that stored the load of felt,’ the poet added imperiously.

The man quickly returned to his tattered book, his brow pearling with sweat. ‘Here we are … one Fabio dal Pozzo, merchant. The goods come from Venice.’

Dante smiled to himself.

W
ORK HAD
been frantic in Maestro Arnolfo’s workshop for some time – an activity that was practically never interrupted, not least because of the need not to let the fire go out.

It was a low basement, filled with the hot dryness that emerged from the kiln in a corner. On the benches, some busy apprentices were pouring on to a brick surface the contents of a crucible that had just been extracted from the flames with a long pair of tongs.

The incandescent glass flowed across the surface. Heedless of the heat, the
maestro
began to trim it with big bronze shears and a shovel of the same material. A few resolute blows and he printed a rectangular shape from the mass, about a foot in length.

‘There’s another pane for the noblemen’s windows, Messer Alighieri. No well-to-do citizen in this city wants the old cloth window coverings any more. It’s good luck for us glass-makers.’

Dante studied the cooling pane. ‘Is that the biggest sheet of glass that you’re capable of making?’ he asked.

‘You can make them a foot along the side as well, but there’s no point. The pane would be too fragile and imperfect. You’re better off mounting pieces this size with a strip of lead. You can fill a whole church window with those, as they do in France. And the result is safer.’

‘I imagine that in your workshop you make mirrors as well,’ the prior went on.

‘The mirrors are my greatest boast, the pride of my workshop. Celebrated throughout the whole of Tuscany. Look.’

Arnolfo walked over to a bench, where a workman was mounting a pane of glass a span long in a brass frame. He took the object from the boy’s hands and held it up smugly in front of the poet’s face.

Dante studied it in silence. His image returned to him as if the surface of the glass were covered by a layer of
water
, blurring his vision. The mirror of Narcissus must have been like that, so that the youth didn’t recognise his own reflection. The background of the image was weakened by the darkness of the lead, in spite of the fact that the light was falling right on his face. He smiled politely as a sign of appreciation. Then he asked, ‘Do you have mirrors that are bigger than this one?’

‘Bigger than this one? What would you want to do with it?’

‘Nothing. I’m just curious to know how big a mirror can be.’

‘Not much bigger than what you’ve seen,’ Arnolfo replied. He seemed offended, as if these observations of Dante’s diminished his work. ‘To increase the size you also have to increase the thickness of the pane,’ he began patiently, as if talking to a slightly slow workman. ‘Because otherwise the glass breaks as it cools down. But as you increase the thickness, it’s impossible to preserve the perfect transparency of the material. Besides, it would be extremely difficult to keep the pane perfectly flat to avoid defects in the reflection, once it’s backed with lead.’

Dante nodded as the
maestro
gave the mirror to his workman. ‘So, it isn’t really possible to make what I suggested? So what would you say about a mirror that was five feet long, and gave a perfect reflection?’

‘I’d say you were raving. Either that or you’d found Maestro Tinca’s coffers.’

‘And yet I have seen one.’

Arnolfo shook his head almost angrily. ‘What you’re saying is impossible. You must have made a mistake. It isn’t possible,’ he repeated. But something in his certainty was crumbling in the face of the prior’s conviction. ‘But you really are sure … I’d give everything I own to see what you describe.’

The poet didn’t reply, merely staring at the old
maestro
. ‘I’m not asking much, just your oath. Promise not to tell anyone about what I’m about to show you.’

Arnolfo’s excitement was mounting. He looked like a mystic contemplating a vision. He fell to his knees in front of the poet. ‘I call the Virgin and all the Saints as my witness. Nothing of what I see shall ever pass my lips.’

Dante took from his bag the corner of mirror that he had found in the warehouse and held it out to the glassmaker. The man touched the edge of the glass with his fingers to assess its thickness. ‘And you say it comes from a five-foot pane?’ he murmured with disbelief. Then he brought his tongue to it as if to test its flavour. ‘Silver …’ he said almost to himself. ‘Strange.’

‘What’s so strange?’

‘I would have expected something modern, based on lead. And yet it’s only silver. If it is as you say, its perfection derives entirely from the extraordinary smoothness and transparency of the vitreous paste.’

‘Who could have made it?’ the prior asked.

Arnolfo shrugged and went on looking at the piece of
metal
. He stroked his bristly chin. ‘It isn’t from here. Greek, perhaps. Or perhaps made in some workshop in the north, in Ravenna, by someone who’s come from far away. I’ve heard that in far-off Persia they have made glass so thin that it was invisible. Or in Venice, if the legend is true …’

‘This Maestro Tinca that you mentioned?’

Arnolfo stared into the void. ‘Perhaps he was a man who never existed. Or perhaps the greatest glass-maker of all time, who knows? A story that the members of our Guild tell one another, a fairy-tale.’

‘What is it?’

‘The story of the kiln at the town of Canal. There came to that place a certain Maestro Tinca, from the land of the devil, and he began making extraordinary kinds of glass. Huge, flat panes, even more than two ells in length, the like of which no one had ever managed to make before. Maestro Tinca, glass-maker to the Emperor.’

Dante suddenly shifted his attention from contemplation of his own hand and gripped the man’s arm. ‘Which emperor?’ he asked.

Arnolfo seemed uncertain at first, then straightened his back. ‘The great and last one. Frederick.’ He had spoken the name clearly as if to challenge him. Perhaps Florence was really full of dormant Ghibellines, as Cecco had implied.

‘And what did this Maestro Tinca do for Frederick?’

‘They say that two messengers from the Emperor came
to
his kiln one night. This was at the time of the Council of Lyon, when Frederick was facing his last battle against …’ The man seemed to be seeking the exact term.

‘The polemicists of the Curia? The Pope?’ Dante suggested.

‘Yes, perhaps the Pope. Or someone even higher up than that,’ Arnolfo suggested enigmatically.